Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2014, as a news piece from 17 October 2014 during the West African Ebola outbreak. Its spread to Western countries “already happening” reflects that time. The Ebola vaccine Ervebo was approved in 2019.
An Ebola vaccine would be available now if the international community had finished the work it started 10 years ago, when Western countries were worried that terrorists might use Ebola as a biological weapon.
In the end, it was concluded that the virus was a problem for underdeveloped countries and therefore not profitable for drug companies to work on. That is what The Guardian reports.
This is the claim made by Dr Seth Berkley, chief executive of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI), who now regrets that the vaccine will come too late to contain this epidemic, as there is no way to make it available in sufficient quantities until 2016.
On Thursday, Professor Peter Piot, one of the scientists who discovered the Ebola virus, warned that this outbreak will not end until the world has a vaccine against the disease.
Ten years ago, work began on a vaccine that, although it was never fully tested, was within a viable framework as a way to stamp out Ebola epidemics. But this work did not begin as a way to protect the hardest-hit communities in Africa. It began out of fear that the developed world could be attacked with the virus in an act of bioterrorism.
But the fear of biological warfare gradually faded, and the drug companies tasked with continuing to develop the vaccine decided it was not worth their while to keep working for such an unattractive market. After all, the risk was among a very poor population in a few “villages” somewhere in Africa. It was not a profitable business for the pharmaceutical industry.
But now the world is throwing up its hands at an outbreak that is impossible to contain, and it will only be a matter of time before it spreads seriously to Western countries, as is already happening.
These doctors now say, from a global perspective, that given the evolution and use of antibiotics, we will probably see a major epidemic of this disease and antibiotic resistance.
This Ebola outbreak is an opportunity to take infectious diseases seriously, wherever they occur, because it seems that the life of “some little black kid in Africa” is not worth as much as a Westerner’s, until we see how the “little black kid’s” problem can affect the “little white kid”.
Ten years have been lost by not putting in place the means that were within our reach. It was the developed world’s responsibility to help protect the most disadvantaged countries.
Now that humanitarian negligence will cost lives all over the world: the lives of little black kids and the lives of little white kids.
Featured image: World Economic Forum, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
